One Day at Value Village

The Viet Nam vet who sweeps the mall for mines every morning has just finished with the task he volunteered for.  He always starts at J.C. Penney's.  Then--gingerly, carefully and wired with jangling nerves, he follows a zig-zagged path  down the succession of ramps before his scheduled arrival at Monkey Ward, his terminus,  at 9 a.m.  "Just in time to help throw back the doors.."

But no one is waiting.  

These are the doldrums of January.  It is still early, but the ship has run aground.  Gnashing of teeth, renting of garments, and cut-to-the-bone discounts on merchandise that failed to capture anyone's Christmas imagination.  

It seems like January, steeped in the fabricated promises contained in resolutions, knows too well its own lie.  Everyone  has mastered uncertainty, but it is small consolation.  The snow has stopped swirling.  The money is either buried, or eaten, or forgotten in the crack of some 19 year old stripper from Pocatella, Idaho.  Sam, the veteran, has tested every boundary, every fortress, every fence, and this knowledge called up a bogey man to challenge from the late 20th century.

The world is obscured by our assumptions and expectations.  In winter, Sam arrives along with many of the boutique's owners and the department store drones before the sun has won his struggle and opened up the Eastern frontier. They too are nervous; there is a nausea that is churned up by the new year's precipitous drop in sales and the weather's persistent precipitation.  

There are those who appreciate the possibility of Orange Julius or Cinnebon for breakfast.  

It is still dark outside.  There is only an informal agenda. The store meeting ends with the same vague rules at odds with the same vague regrets that contain a whole chorus of employee dissatisfaction.  Melony has made it a kind of refuge for herself where--if she stays quiet and patient and whole--no one will possibly associate her with the (near) blizzard that has finally come to an end.  Sam--on the other hand--answers the call: a beggar begging beggars becomes the darling of the right.  And his sincere street evangelizing will be chopped up into awkward, angry bytes that do not do justice to his whole person.  He takes off the sweaty tights...

He begins before the hero has been found.  

To this, the vet mutters something back in a low grumble:  "So much is out of our control."  

It is bitterly cold.  "This is why malls were dreamed into existence."  

And so it goes, so it goes...  All the fear and doubt that one hundred thousand intrepid proles can muster is slow cooking off from the defrost fans.  From time to time, a mixture of impatience and boredom overwhelms them.  Desperately, they hold their maxed-out credit cards in gloveless hands.  They are chipping at the icy otherness of these bad feelings.  

If they don't get up--hangover or not--and somehow manage to transform that green V. W. rabbit into some kind of snowcat, who will possibly pay the minimum balance?  

Pause. Pause. Pause.  

How does a middle-aged woman--more used to animal prints than camouflage--find herself in the cross currents of our enemy's secret communications?  The revelation is disorienting.  Her plans were just to buy her husband and her son underwear (wherever the underwear was on sale) and then to head home.  

For most of the past half hour, she had been nervously going about her business while anxiously aware of the burly minesweeper out of the corner of her eye.  Happy and confident that he had done his job well, Sam is no longer preoccupied with the carnage that infects his brain.  Sometimes, he confuses everyone by reciting whole passages of Pere Ubu or humming Chim Chiminy from Mary Poppins.  

The vet, now wrapped in the big blue pillow of his eider down jacket,  has no intention of disrupting the woman's business.  He respects "her contribution."  Grunt or General, everyone deserves their time respected.  But, with an informal agenda and strange new expectations, assumptions open like toxic flowers.  This too is a secret garden...

"Not everyone idolizes a gloveless hand."

Cold Song

What power art thou, Who from below, Hast made me rise, Unwillingly and slow, From beds of everlasting snow!

See'st thou not how stiff, And wondrous old, Far unfit to bear the bitter cold.

I can scarcely move, Or draw my breath, I can scarcely move, Or draw my breath.

Let me, let me, Let me, let me, Freeze again... Let me, let me, Freeze again to death!

--by John Dryden

from 

Henri Purcell's Opera King Arthur

I must keep writing; the cold fingers--arthritic, gnarled--are not the nimble dancers that they once were.  Before, as memory serves, a pas-de-deux of ungloved hands skimmed lithely over your geography.  You were toe-shoe tall but shrouded by the snow-white sheet.  

Sleeping.  

Hard.  

My hands found you, the edge of you, the end of the sheet's feigned modesty, the beginning of you.  

Cue music.  Focus the blue spot.  My fingers spread, left and right, enthusiastic fans.  Their bright aura breaks up the intrusion of that mechanical sun.  I am lost in an amphitheater of dreams.  I hear the blades carve grace and graffiti into the frozen surface.  I hear the audience murmur.  I hear them bill and coo.  The landscape is familiar, even in the winter blindness.  The northern lights are taffy tangling around my hands.  The ice is illuminated from inside.  The mirrored ball spins.

Later that night, we are wandering amidst the drifts that artists carve for Winter Carnival, reshaping them into moments stolen from fairy tales:  the vanquished monster, the victor's elaborate throne. You climb into the king's lap;  his patience is an invitation.  The torches are lit--inside the brains of fevered geniuses, in some hundred tender beating hearts, along the trail that leads to the shy shores of the little hidden lake--and the flames dance their orange light into the dark and eerie corners of the leafless woods.

On a wool blanket, we lay close together. You are feeding off my heat, the furnace of my hands.  They skate over the white ice of your skin.  

You melt.  

You shiver.  

In sleep, the terrain that makes you begins to flatten out.  This is to be expected, like slow erosion and the drift of continents, all the forces of weather and time.  The land, now glaciated, lies buried beneath memory, compressed and crushing the rocks under the weight of all the tripping dancers that have mastered the parquet floor--freshly waxed and shimmering beneath the slipper of the moon--and now in pairs dare the ice to open up, crack and crackle under their weight of two, of you and some other, faceless in the dream.

Three Photographs: 1. The Winter's Gate

This photograph is bleached by the August sun.  When you show it to me, we are drinking lemonade, mid-afternoon on the lawn.  The blue glass is wet with condensation.  The tiny bubbles, the glass, the ice, the liquid itself capture the sunlight, holding it until...  my next drink, your next drink.  

The thermal  reactor's fire is refracted a hundred directions We are pouring retardant on the furnace of the day.  To distract me perhaps, you have pulled the glossy 4 x 6 print from your purse.  Now a couple of years old, this picture was taken during that desolate winter when--blizzard blowing in after blizzard blowing out--all the roads, shoveled and plowed, were turned into trenches cut out of the gratuitous snow for some unplanned campaign on the northern front. 

Familiar, this is a photograph of the gate at the end of the winding quarter mile of road that leads up out of the coulee from the ranch.  But the landscape is inscrutable.  Under the quilted down, the very contours of the land are changed.   This is a new world.  The weight of the snow, the cold like a cast around my left foot and ankle (after my black rubber boot was pulled off and is out there somewhere half buried in a drift anticipating spring), the unnerving arrival of dusk at 4:30 in the afternoon:  it is so easy in summer to forget the little horrors of winter.

And in my fingers, the glossy surface of the print suggests a coolness that fools us easily.  The heat is precarious and savage.  It spits and sizzles and manages to say my name (at least the hissing shhhhh) throughout the afternoon.  In my imagination, I take refuge there where I have cut an elaborate igloo into the drifts.  Tormented by the heat, the sun, the bugs that tug and sting and tickle, I want for nothing save for winter.

Snowball

After New Years, back on campus, and the blacktop surrounding the Sacred Heart Academy is (again) identified as a "loud and crowded" landscape made for snowball fights and stolen cigarettes.  Breath and smoke co-mingle in the icy air and bad behavior is disguised by simply being alive.  The snow is dry and difficult to confirm and multiply into ammunition.  No grenades are made, bullets perhaps, or pellets to pelt your nemesis.  The evidence of your crime will surely melt away.  

Churlish girls are hurling pearls at the buoyant boys from the barrio.  The convent soldiers, another year older, move like frigid penguins crossing the Winter garden.  The flat field rises into two distinct mounds of powdered sugar over which the battling hoards rush and retreat.  The nuns shuffle up the glazed sidewalk taking advantage of the pause in the action as both sides rebuild their arsenals.

They have a habit of hardening every dilemma into black and white, a starched morality that is unworkable (unless you live in a convent, with your expenses absorbed by some larger entity, and no possibility for human entanglements--romantic, platonic/public or private--to blow a life off course). The urge is to stop the snowball fight.  The desire is to apprehend the cigarettes from frozen fingers, shivering lips.

But until the bell rings, our ladies wait inside with their authority.  Sister Mary Elizabeth stands staring out of  the library window.  A long look, she is lost in memory.  She is a girl again and in Montreal the Winter pervades everything.  She sleds near the cemetery.  She skates on the frozen river.  In the depths of the cold, she and her classmates (buses decommishined by the volume of snow) ski to and from the school, as do the teachers.  She is eight;  she is fourteen; she is only five years old...

The surface of the river cracks.  Icicles, suspended like swords, break off and fall from the sky.  A nugget of ice compressed like a diamond shatters the glass just as the 8:30 bell calls the young people into the rooms, warm--more or less--haven from the compression of winter. 

Beat Box Banshee

At the edge of town, there are no sidewalks and the eccentric houses are connected by a narrow dirt track that knows well the path decided beneath the cottonwoods.  There are dogs in the yards with voices high and low, friendly and threatening (at times, simultaneously).  They come out of their dog houses, the pads on their paws cold on the fresh snow, their breath boiling out of their mouths like steam from a kettle.  Ignored, they drag the chains behind them and retreat back inside.

The kitchens call the residents out of their rooms and down to yolk-painted breakfast nooks that look out over fields of starched linen:  the red wheelbarrow overflowing with the drifting gems, the ponies with their shambled furs, the baby blue pick-up remembering the fifties on a radio that hasn't sparked in years.  The truck is parked (for the winter) in a bank of plowed meringue.  

While inside there is coffee, bacon, and the babies soiled diaper.  The smells--collectively--are the perfume of promise and possibility, the coming day, the baby's life ahead of her.  Her parents imagine the tens of thousands of tomorrows.  But outside, in your black tire boots, the sense of smell is the first to go.  Your breath condenses on the Nordic knit of your scarf.  No one knows these flags and so, the motif  of scarf, of mittens, and of ski mask evades them.  And they think you are a super hero, must be, come to the playground from afar, from across the desert.  

It is dark still.  The little town is inching toward the solstice.  The Christmas concert is Friday.  The fourth grade girls have descended on the monkey bars like crows, and they are singing, stomping their feet.  This is a raucous version of Do you hear what I hear? Standing atop a mountain of snow zealously shoveled by early-morning nuns--penguins almost giggling in the December darkness--you already know the answer to the plaintive lyric.  You do not hear what others hear, nor do they see what you see.  

"We live as we dream alone."

You see the eastern horizon begin to bleed.  The color spilling over the jumble of the Crazy Mountains, igniting the Milk River on fire, and striking the frosted metal of the play equipment like a bell made of light.  The bundled children cast long shadows.  The nuns in their ear muffs tower over the scene.  The bell rings and we line  up like cattle, rosy cheeks and the blue ice of your eyes.

The light has come, as if conveyed on wings of angels, bestowed upon us by the sky.  Thus another day, draped in the temporal blue of winter light, finds its way down the valley, through the main street and over the high brick walls of the convent.  As if it had been searching for you, the sun illuminates the hope in your gaze.  

I remember you with the snot bubbling out of your nostrils in your bright blue snowsuit.  I want to take off the horned-rim nerd that sits on my nose.  I want to take my glasses off and look through the sapphire prisms of your Prussian garden...  Everything that is anticipated is still tucked in under the quilt and the gun.  In time for vespers, the stained glass explodes with daylight and the fourth grade girls start singing...

again...

Monkey Bars

The retarded boy died in front of us.  Beneath us really, having fallen head-first into the asphalt, the frozen black lake, his blue eyes open, reflecting the winter sky.  The stocking cap was trapped beneath the weight of his head and his chubby body was stuffed into a blue snowsuit that had been uncomfortably small for him two years ago.  

He was still in seizure, flopping, like a fish, spitting up blood.  And from this warm ribbon of red, this blood, steam rose out of the child's mouth.  It hovered in his gaping throat and lingered like a cigarette (a vice he would never know) just beyond the lips.  It was as if he were still breathing and yet refusing to inhale.

Our own breath was hurried, like our conversation.  Perched on the apex of the metal structure--between the agitated siren song of the girls down below--we puzzled over what had happened.  And why?  It had been as if someone had attached a car battery to the monkey bars.  A surge had shot through the slow kid's nerves.  Abruptly, he stopped laughing; that distinct chortle ceased and he heaved up.  His mittened hands had felt the burn.  Instinctively, they had unfolded, open, done with their prayer.  

He fell backwards.  There was a crack.  The poorly attached black boot on his right foot--ill fitting and unlatched--caught on the cold metal and slipped off (easily), tugging the wool sock off beneath it.

Another fish, a smaller fish, his foot suffered, exposed--gasping--in the cool oxygen of the winter air.  His toes were as blue as scales by the time the (screaming) teacher's aid arrived from the far side of the playground.  A plaid wool scarf sat tied gingerly below her chin, balanced on her beehive's aspirations, shaking, yelling, "Get down from there."  She was grabbing at our bell bottoms, "Get down from there."  She either thought we had pushed the boy or that each of us--the four still entangled in the monkey maze--were on the verge of plummeting to earth, replicating his fate. 

Meanwhile, he just lay there, dead and ready for the creel.  There was nothing to be done about it. There was no reason to come down.

Cold

Winter hides its secrets
in plain sight.  The blindness
of the snow that goes
in drifts, the shifting dunes
that rose crumbled
under the weight,
the next wave
of freezing rain.

The powers that be
were the powers that were.  They searched
the purpose of the river,
starched the surface blue.
The succession of three
threats came out of the north,
in cold blasts of aerosol--
a refined universe
upheld in every droplet, suspended,
falling--mists made of atoms
lasting well beyond
the equinox.

Where car lots could be
cemeteries and gardens
might be memories,
white fire ignites the moon.

And you stay
inside, arrested by your sweaters
the bulk, the burden, a cable
knit of fears and loneliness.
You know.  Nothing
compares to the coming hum,
the blizzards, a plague of
ice cicadas on the wings
of an arctic front.

Rumination: December 1956

The to-do at the swank hotel,
the ruckus in the street that followed, 14 below and still
an audience has collected,
on glazed pavement, in every frosted window.
The girl knows she can escape
from no door she has ever seen
or held the key to. She is 14 above and warming.

Her slip is visible. Under the fur,
she shivers. The crowd can't keep
her warm. Desire chases desire.
One might be easily caught, ensnared:
seen looking, heard listening;
it is shameful, the way, we anticipate
a scream.

Her body emerges
out of the sun, a street lamp straining
to catch the angel. When she shatters,
the bell boys and the boys in blue
(not the king, not the president)
swarm, heroes ready-made
because of their uniforms,
patriotic shades of red and navy,
the bright white spotlight
of her exposed breast.

The gawkers are all nauseous
on all fours--gloves and mittens--
frosting the snow with their (steaming)
bile.

Meanwhile,
the suicide note rides the Chinook
breezes, tumbling off a thermal,
slowly finding earth. "I give up"
is scrawled across the top:

"I give up your name, your touch.
I give up my ambitions, my faith. I give up
and surrender. I admit
that I'm concerned,
worried, obsessed. I surrender
my fears. I give up the idea of us,
the idea of me."

One of the police detectives,
humming something, spits
out his gum. Softly, to himself
he starts to sing.

Rumi reminds me,
"Songs give pleasure."